


This Is the Way the World Ends

by Ghanima_Starkiller



Series: Reimagining Fairy Tales [4]
Category: Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms, Rapunzel (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 09:00:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghanima_Starkiller/pseuds/Ghanima_Starkiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rapunzel set in a post-nuclear devastated world....</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is the Way the World Ends

Mother Gothel was right. That thought goes through the head of the girl who has been called Rapunzel all of her life as she gazes out across the wastelands that surround her, a dry, arid breeze blowing the frayed ends of her once gloriously flowing golden hair, the jagged edges of the hastily sawed tresses poking into her eyes and cheeks and the corners of her mouth. Her belly was round and she felt pangs there, worried for the life that grew there, unaware that it was in fact two.

She couldn’t say when the world had ended, only that it had and had left these badlands behind; she can see the ruin of buildings buried in the red sand, and here and there her bare feet will come across something like a candelabra or jewelry box mostly buried in the grit. And she realizes that her tower, the metal spire with no doors and only one window at its pointed summit, had not been prison nor tomb, but fortification. Still, she is not sorry for what has been done, only its tragic outcome.

She wanders a day and a night until she finds shelter amongst a small band of survivors—soldiers mostly, a few with their women. During the day, they work together to survive; at night, they protect each other from the muties that lurk in the darkness. She stays with them for the next six months, until she gives birth to twins—one girl, one boy. The healthy delivery heartens them all, and the babies do not want for attention.

But there is no time for rest and Rapunzel begins her duties once more after only two week’s rest. Her skin burns and peels in the harsh glare of the sun in its pink sky, in the wind carrying thin, twisting whips of sand and of a lingering sickness from the war, but it does not concern her as she follows the familiar path to the uncontaminated spring that burbles from the ground. It is a long trek and she sings to herself as she used to sing for companionship within the tower and to Mother. Her voice is as the gentle chiming of tiny silver bells and carries well across the desolate landscape.

She continues this routine for three months, day after day, until one morning she kneels on the bank, filling the water bladders, when she hears a shuffling behind her. She draws the jagged piece of metal she uses as a blade from her sash and spins around, but it is only a blind beggar swathed in dirty bandages and a tattered cloak. “Friend or foe?” she asks, and his sightless face turns toward the sound of her voice.

“Forgive me, for sneaking up on you,” he says, his voice hoarse through a deeply scarred throat. “I meant no harm. You are the first person I have come upon wandering these wastes and your voice… it reminds me of a time long ago. Someone I once knew.” She feels no threat from the man, whom she mistakes for old because of his attire, and leads him back to the camp.

“How did you get your injuries, kind sir?” she inquires, blushing a little. “If you don’t mind me asking. Was it the war?”

He chuckles and she thinks it is a bitter sound. “No,” he tells her, “no, it wasn’t the war. I fell from a great distance and landed near an unexploded mine; I was lucky that the plummet did not kill me, not quite so that the impact set the bomb off. If I had been closer, I would have been done for; the shrapnel did this to me.” Rapunzel thinks of her tower, of the mine field that Mother Gothel had surrounded it with to discourage inquisitive guests, and she frowns, furrowing her brow deeply as she gnaws at her bottom lip.

“Have I upset you?” he asks, concerned as he places a hand on her thin arm.

“It is an upsetting tale,” she concedes. “But tell me, sir, how did you fall?”

“I was ascending a great height when I learned that my beloved was dead,” he answers, and his voice is so dismayed that it breaks her heart. “The… rope that I was using was severed but also I… let go, allowed myself to drop. I wanted to live no longer.”

She leads him to her shelter and he hears the coo of the sleeping babies, his head suddenly perks up, swinging from side to side as he listens. “Is that…?” he inquires, his tone stunned, incredulous.

“My son and my daughter,” she replies with a warm smile and a glance toward the little slumbering lumps huddled together beneath a blanket. “I bore them not three months ago. Or will it be four soon? It is so difficult to keep track in this changeless place.”

“And the father?” he rasps.

“I can only assume that he is dead,” she tells him, and suddenly her sorrow wells in her breast so greatly that she cannot breath. He hears this and reaches out for her, to comfort her. His hands are rough, callused, but the caress is strangely familiar, soothing.

“Then we are the same,” he murmurs. “May I?” His hands reach for her face, and she understand that he wants to see her with his fingers, to create a picture in his mind of this young woman he was speaking with. She is slender, perhaps too much so; her bones stand out prominently in some places. Her muscles are thin but tough, solid. She has a small button of a nose, and eyes that turn up so subtlety at the corners. His heart begins to pound in his chest; he swallows and there is a dry click in his throat.

“You are thirsty,” she observes suddenly, shaken, distressed with herself for not offering him any of her provisions sooner. His fingers just sweep the ragged edges of her hair as she turns from him, and he realizes that he’s grasping at air, as if he wants to prove something to himself. “You must be very hungry, as well.” She reaches for a sealed, aluminum package, and he hears the wrapper crinkle and shakes his head sadly, holding a hand up to stop her from wasting food rations she had her babies will need.

“I cannot swallow ordinary foodstuff,” he informs her, wrapping a hand around his damaged throat. A troubled, sympathetic sound comes from her own and she asks him how he has gotten by for so long. “I drink; I have had both good and bad water in my wanderings. Sometimes I can dissolve the rations in the water, or keep them in my mouth until I can work them down. It is an effort I only subject myself to every few days.” She fetches him fresh water, and plenty of it, and she is biting down on her lip once more as she considers how she can aid him.

“May I hold them?” he inquires, and she watches as he cradles on baby and then the other, so gentle and affectionate, doting. Something is awakening in her, stirring, memories that an encroaching madness had almost eradicated. The babies chuckle and burble as they wriggle in his arms, reaching for his face. They pull bandages loose and a lock of long, glossy black hair falls over his shoulder. Perhaps he is younger than she first believed? “Have you named them?”

“Not yet,” she says, shaking her head a little. “I know so few names,” she murmurs, and he wonders at this odd and cryptic comment.

“And what are you called?”

“They call me Persinette here,” she answers softly.

“And is that your real name?” he inquires, but Rapunzel does not answer. She does not want to give the name that Mother Gothel had granted her.

“And what may your real name be, sir?” she says, eying him closely as he smiles, his lip split and healed many times over.

“I am no one.”

“And so we have something else in common,” she says briskly. But she watches him that night; he sleeps in her shelter by invitation, snoring lightly. This man is tender and kind. She does not care that he is deformed, that all she can see of his is a bit of heavily scarred forehead, a black lock of his hair and his mouth and disfigured chin. She begins to think him beautiful, and she wants to take care of him.

When her babies wake her the next morning for their feeding, she has an idea. He wakes to her soft caress in his hair, jerking in surprise and then settling when he realizes that it is only she. “Come closer,” she murmurs, easing her dress down over her shoulder and baring her soft, swollen breast. “I will look after you,” she tells him lovingly, and the words, so sweetly whispered, make him compliant in his astonishment of rising affection. She takes his face in her delicate hands and leads his mouth to her; at first, his lips are grasping, thinking she means to water him, but then he tastes her soft flesh, his outreaching tongue brushing the tip of her puckered nipple. He recoils by instinct, but she does not release him; she is insistent.

Finally, he allows his lips to curl around that taut little nub. He rests against her for a moment, his breath whistling in and out of his nose beneath his bandages. And then on intuition, his lips compress around her, giving her a sort of smacking kiss, pulling at the bud with the wet suction of his mouth. Straight away, his mouth fills with the sweet, warm milk of her motherhood. With a gasp, he halts himself, to be sure but her hold on him does not budge and inch. And so, after a moment of clumsiness and unease, he buries his face in the plushness of her breast and suckles her hungrily. His belly begins to feel warm, full for the first time in ages. And something else as well. A delicious tension just below, in that place long neglected.

She feels it as well, a throbbing wetness between her thighs, and stifles a moan. When he has drained her, he turns away, confused, damaged skin flushed. He’s smacking and licking his lips, struggling to rein in his reawakened cock. “Have I done something wrong?” she asks innocently, and the tone is so familiar, he thinks he is finally sure. He keeps his back to the sound of her voice.

“No,” he replies huskily. “Thank you; you are… so kindly and gentle.” Without resistance, he takes her again that night, nursing her greedily, gulping down all that she can give him. He thinks he hears her breath quickening this time, can feel her heart racing as quickly as his, but dares not to dream as he wraps his arms around her waist to bring her closer.

The next morn, when the sky is turning from blood red to a glorious, triumphant pink as the sun breaches the horizon, he is awakened by the feel of his hands rolling away the strips of cloth that conceal him. And now he does protest, trying to hide his deformed countenance with his hands, but she soothingly pries them away, her finger tips gliding over his injuries, examining his torn and milky eyes. “Do not be ashamed,” she tells him, running her fingers through his hair, “you are beautiful.” He feels a tear, hot and salty, hit his cheek; others follow, and he reaches up to rub them from her cheeks with the pad of his thumb. He still has some, blurry vision in one eye and he can see her finally. It doesn’t matter: she has changed, his vision would only deceive him; it is in his heart that he now knows.

“My Rapunzel,” he groans and she gasps and attempts to pull away, as if she’s been struck. “No!” he pleads, gasping for her. “Please! I believed you dead! How can this tender creature who has nurtured me be my Rapunzel, for Mother Gothel has told me herself that she has killed her? But you are, aren’t you? Do you not… remember me?” He sounds desperate, his voice near a cry and imbued with so much love that it moves her, moves her to remember….

And from the cloudy depths of her muddled recollections, she sees his face as it had been, unmarred and dashing. She brings to mind the nights making love, how warm, compassionate and considerate a lover he was. She evokes a scene of Mother Gothel noticing how tight her daughter’s dresses had become around the belly, and how she, Rapunzel, naively comments upon it. “My love,” she weeps, kissing his mouth over and over again. Her tears fall into his eyes and as he blinks, he believes he can see more clearly through both. “Forgive me, my love, for not remembering you. Your children…” She glances at the twins, fast asleep and contented with full bellies. “We are together, all of us.”

He feasts upon her again, this time teasing, tickling her nipple with his tongue and making satisfied noises in his throat at the taste of her. And when there is no more to give of her mouth-watering milk, he takes her by the thighs and pushes the hem of her dress up; she wears no undergarments and nothing encumbers him from burrowing his mouth into the gash of her sex, already slick, throbbing and ready for him. He knows what she likes, what will push her over those little precipices: he circles her clit in tight, firm and hungry little movements, swirling around it with the tip of his tongue, the flat of that abrasive organ tickling the swollen tip of that jutting nub.

He sups from her wellspring, trying to decide which is more delicious: her mother’s milk, or the how, seat water-sweet juices that spout from her sex as he imbibes of her ravenously. Arching, pushing her hips up to meet his face as his nose slips inside her cleft and strokes her clitoris as his tongue laps at the burning flesh of her; he rubs himself against her until he feels her clench and stifle a cry. She reaches such rewarding ecstasy as she pants and twists in his grasp, trembling.

She collapses backward, an ingenuously blissful smile on her lips as he mounts her, pushes aside his cloak and plunges his rigid shaft into her. It staggers even him, how long he makes it last, tilting his hips so that every thrust ploughs him further and further inside her pink depths, his thickly furred groin, the firm curve of the bone beneath, caressing that tender button within the folds of her womanly sex each time he fills her to the thick root.

They move together, a primal sort of dance, a savage rhythm, their bodies slapping together wetly, both from the sweat upon their glistening skin and his cock squelching in the juice that flows from her freely. She comes for him once more and seems on the threshold of a third when he at last can hold back no longer. Growling, his body jerking as he spends, her presses his face between her breasts, kissing as he pumps his seed into her womb, her she has grown and born his children.

They lie side by side for a long while, stroking the other while murmuring endearments, until the excited quivering subsides and the afterglow settles and begins to dissipate. He vows never will he leave her or his family again.

The next day, they set out together, looking possibly for a land that has not been devastated—his home perhaps. They come across the tower bunker on their fourth day. Rapunzel sees her severed braid laying in a coiled pile at its base, the ground nearby in turmoil from the exploded mine. And then something occurs to her and she looks up at that window. There is Mother Gothel’s mummified corpse, dangling from the ledge of the window as if she was still trying to find a way to escape when she starved to death.

They make camp just outside the minefield that protects the tower and she nurses their children and puts them to sleep, and then turns to her husband and he feeds as well, more mischievously, wickedly, and then he takes her from behind so Mother Gothel’s now sightless eyes can see: Her triumph was short-lived and hollow. Love conquers.

This is the way, this is the way, this is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper.


End file.
